Dead Rising follows the harrowing tale of Frank West, a freelance photojournalist after the scoop of a lifetime. In a small suburban town that’s overrun by zombies, he escapes to the local shopping mall, thinking it will be safe. Now it’s a standoff, with zombies unable to get Frank, but him unable to get out & escape. Fortunately, he’s got an entire mall at his disposal. Utilize everything you can find to fight off the flesh-hungry mob and search for the truth behind the horrendous epidemic.
- Real-time gameplay – Time marches on whether Frank is actively engaged or simply stationary
- Dynamic enemies – Record numbers of zombies will come at you & react to their environment — each has unique behaviors and appearances
- The variety of stores will give you weapons aplenty – an endless supply of vehicles, makeshift weapons, and food are waiting for you
- Encounter other survivors along the way — helping them will give you more clues as to what has happened and what you need to do to stop it
- Visual clarity – Playing in native 720p resolution allows for unprecedented detail and clarity in gameplay
List Price: $ 19.99
Price: $ 7.95
An exciting new genre for the 360, but plagued with old problems,
Although I prefer FPS (first person shooters) to the 3rd person adventure games, I loved the latest installments of the Lara Croft and the Hitman series games. As of this writing, I have completed Dead Rising in the 72 hour mode and am now replaying the game to try to earn all of the achievements.
Dead Rising is a brand-new genre for the Xbox 360. It’s closest cousin is Condemned, a first person horror adventure game but Dead Rising has a number of unique features that set it apart. First off, you can pick up just about anything in the area and use it as a weapon. Potted plants, lawnmowers and even an electric guitar are all at your disposal. There are easily hundreds of potential weapons in this game and part of the fun is discovering new ways to fight off zombies with what you have available at hand.
Adding to the distinct style of Dead Rising is the ability to customize your character. As you make your way through the mall, you can try on new clothing available from the various shops. Cool suits, fashionable glasses and, yes, even women’s and children’s apparel is fair game to put on. Besides wearing it as you battle the zombies, your character will also appear as you have dressed him during the video cut-scenes, which is a nice extra touch I was delighted to see. Food has also been given special “abilities” in the game. For example, you might find a frozen or raw food somewhere in the mall. If you eat it, you earn one or two points of health. But pop it into an oven before you eat it, and it will completely fill your health meter. Likewise, you can mix certain fluids in a blender can make an extra powerful energy drink!
If you can’t tell by everything I’ve already mentioned, this game is deep. I’ve only touched the surface to avoid revealing any spoilers, but trust me when I say you can get totally wrapped up in this game. The plot, the game and every little thing (be sure to check out the bookstore!) in the vast mall has been developed with so much detail that you’ll find yourself enthralled by it.
However, when undertaking such an ambitious project, there have to be some downfalls. The absolutely worst is the save game methodology. The developers have decided that you must find a restroom or a couch to save. While this seemed cute and clever at first, it quickly became frustrating and enraging (when you couldn’t find one right before you got forced into a boss fight). Every player on the planet will find this feature problematic, I guarantee.
One thing that other reviewers haven’t mentioned is that some of the level bosses (called “Psychopaths”) are redundant or unfairly matched. For example, often you’ll be faced with enemies with devastating long-range weapons when all you have is a knife or 2×4 to try and knock out your opponent with. In another boss attack, I literally started at a save point and had to go through two full levels to face a boss who would inevitably defeat me and then I’d have to start all over again. These opponents often have a move that will completely incapacitate you in a single swipe, even when you have full health. This, combined with the fact that you will often have to run halfway across the map (where your last game save was) to repeat the battle, makes the game incredibly annoying. If you could ammo up, then save right before the boss battle, the game would be considerably more enjoyable.
Another item, although mentioned by others in a different light, is the text-based mission objectives. Many reviewers have stated that the text is almost unreadable on smaller, standard definition televisions. However, my biggest complaint in this area is that the text is used at all. This game, by its very nature, is immersive. When you’re trapped in a mall and having to fight zillions of zombies, you shouldn’t have to stop to read the text of another character. I honestly wish Capcom had spent a little extra time and money to change all of the text interactions to spoken instructions. Not only would this have solved their biggest technical problem with the game, it would have also helped keep the suspense.
Finally, there’s a lot of “load-screen-itis” in this game. And by that, I mean that you’ll be seeing a lot of the loading screen. Granted, the mall is a huge environment, and the load times are a snappy 5-6 seconds, but it gets annoying when you walk into an elevator and wait, walk down a hallway and wait, turn left and wait… You get the picture.
There is no online component to allow multiplayer (which would be awesome!) but Dead Rising does have downloadable content from Xbox Live. It was available just days after the game released and consists of eight “keys” which unlock several new outfits for the main character, available at no charge. As you’d expect, the game also supports Xbox Achievements, with 50 of them to earn, each worth 20 Gamerscore points. You’ll have to…
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|Great game, even with a few bumps…,
Well, I have been enjoying Dead Rising for a week now and I can’t honestly think of a game out there that is more fun than this one. While I do agree with everone else that the small font puts a damper on the mood, I have just learned to move on with it. I can read it but it is tough on the old eyes. I have a standard def 36″ WEGA and while it is small, it is legible. I will try it on my parents 61″ Hidef this weekend to see any difference. I can only imagine what the graphics look like if they look this great on my standard def TV.
This game is very deep. The save feature is disappointing and you will find that you will learn to constantly bring up the map to check for save points. After you play for a hour or more and die and have to replay through it, you quickly learn. Another thing I don’t care for is having to restart the game if you miss a “scoop” and it throws the rest of the game out. You can still play and do the missions, atleast for a while but you can no longer find the truth. This happened to me twice. The first time, I just plain didn’t realize that it would happen and did not do the scoop missions in a timely manner. The second time I played through it, I thought I was doing great time and kept checking the watch (another feature you learn to do quite often) and when it said my next mission would begin at 3:00, I noticed that when it turned to 4:00, the missions ended and once again I lost the remainder of the scoop missions. Learn to watch the scoop timelines. They will slowly count down and turn colors to warn you. I guess I just had too much fun whacking zombies and lost track of the in game time.
The depth of this game comes from the many ways in which to dispose of zombies. You can pretty much use ANYTHING in the game to take them out. One spot had me pick up a power auger, which is used to dig post holes. I stuck a zombie and cranked the gas and watched him spin around. Then, I proceeded to walk through the crowd of zombies and take them out. In the process of this, the zombie spinning on my auger started to break apart. This was a great laugh. Again, you can use pretty much everything in the game and while most do eventually tear up, you can always find something else. Another fun part was walking to the other end of the mall through the Leisure Park and seeing a push mower/brushhog and mowing down the crowd of zombies.
I was completely impressed with the graphics of this game. While the zombies do tend to look a lot alike, the environment is just gorgeous. Capcom did a great job to put so many of the zombies onscreen at once. Later through the game, you will encounter bosses that can be difficult to beat. Just be sure to save before you fight a boss, although the first time around it is hard because you don’t know when you will fight a boss. You enter a store and then wham, you have a boss fight. As you play through the game, you are encouraged to take pictures and help escort people to the security room, which is basically your home base. You will see that if you can capture pictures that pick up on drama or horror or even erotica, among others, will get you more points and these points along with the points for saving people will get you to level up which will help you increase your life or the amount of things you can carry or unlock special moves.
This is definitely not a game for the younger crowd as it is very gory. I think Capcom has a hit on their hands and hopefully they can work it into a sequel in some way with improvements to the aforementioned bumps but hopefully they will get a patch over Live to help correct the text problems. Most of the time during the normal text there is not much voice over work. During the cutscenes, which are nicely animated, there is no problem as their is good voice over acting, incredible good when compared to the Resident Evil series. You won’t go wrong with this game. It is a great game to enjoy so long as you are old enough to understand that things that you can do in the game can’t be done in real life. As dumb as that sounds, there are those out there who might want to recreate something they did in the game.
Enjoy this game and know that you will die often and have to repeat things over again but for the majority, it isn’t a problem as things aren’t often the same way the second time around, except for cutscenes of course. That is another great thing about this game, the repayability is incredibly deep. Forgive the text, the dumb AI and the lousy save functions and enjoy the game for what it got right.
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